Deep-sea mining is coming. Some of the biggest mineral deposits are around the Cook Islands (above). (Brian Scantlebury/Flickr)

That cell phone you carry. It’s made from copper, gold, lead, nickel, zinc and a plethora of less known, hard-to-pronounce metals, not to mention the mined materials needed for the battery that powers the device. Same goes for your computer and other electronics you use on a daily basis.

The desire for these products is unflagging, with newer versions requiring an ever more complicated cocktail of minerals. Yet our resources on land aren’t limitless, so we’ve turned to the sea in search of new supply. “The world’s demand for minerals continues to increase and the terrestrial resources are becoming stretched,” writes the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which controls all mineral-related activities in international waters. “In addition, deep seabed resources often contain a higher concentration of valuable minerals than their terrestrial alternatives.”

The ocean floor teems with metal (at least in spots we’ve targeted so far): copper and nickel, cobalt and silver, even gold. Many consider it the next frontier in mining. Yet much of the ocean remains unstudied, meaning we have no baseline for determining what harm such a disturbance might cause. As we near the first deep-sea mining expeditions — Australian-based Nautilus has the proper permits and could be working below the waves as soon as 2016 — scientists are scrambling to answer these questions before we no longer can.

Heavy MetalsOcean waters cover more than 70 percent of our Earth’s surface. Yet we’ve explored a mere droplet, according to NOAA. “For all of our reliance on the ocean, 95 percent of this realm remains unexplored, unseen by human eyes,” notes NOAA’s National Ocean Service.

“The extent that we’ve covered is very, very small,” confirms marine biologist Christian Neumann. He’s part of the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative or DOSI, a multi-disciplinary group formed in 2013 aimed at making sure the right people are paying attention to the right issues surrounding deep-sea mining.

DOSI and other projects like MIDAS (stands for Managing Impacts of Deep-seA reSource exploitation) have much work to do, because of the staggering amount we still don’t know.

We do know, however, that great potential sits on, and below, the seabed floor. “There are certainly rich deposits to be had in our deep oceans and now it is possible to reach them,” Maria Baker, project manager of the International Network for Scientific Investigations of Deep-Sea Ecosystems (INDEEP) told weather.com by e-mail.

The three types of deep-sea mining are worth describing briefly. The first, seafloor massive sulfides (SMS), are caused by hydrothermal fluids on or below the seafloor along the oceanic plate boundaries. “That’s the type of deposit off Papua New Guinea,” Phil Weaver of MIDAS told weather.com, and that’s where Nautilus plans to mine. The largest known SMS deposit is a 94-million-ton expanse of dry ore containing gold, silver, copper and zinc in the Red Sea.

An example of a manganese nodule, one of the three main sources to find mineral deposits on the ocean floor. (GRID-Arendal)

Cobalt-rich crusts, another type of mining, are deposits full of cobalt and other metals found on the seafloor, typically on seamounts, and are typically irregularly contoured. Despite the abundance of these crusts — one ISA estimate says they cover nearly 2 percent of the entire ocean floor — Weaver predicts this mining is the furthest off.

Which leaves manganese nodules, metal-containing rocks found thousands of feet below the surface that can be mined by sifting just the top foot or so of seabed. The Pacific holds an abundance of these, particularly in a spot called the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone and around the Cook Islands. “The nodules in the Cook Islands lie in national waters. The rest is in international waters and requires permission from the International Seabed Authority,” Weaver said. “The ISA has only, so far, given license for exploration, not for exploitation. It’s still working on the regulations that will be put in place to govern and manage exploitation. Those won’t be in place for two or three years yet.”

Exploitation vs. ProtectionSo while mining of our ocean deep isn’t happening this month or next, it will happen in the near future. “It’s coming,” Neumann said. “But it’s not tomorrow, and it’s not the day after tomorrow.” That gives us time to ask — and hopefully answer — some important questions. Like: who owns the ocean floor, and how do we both explore deep-sea resources and care for the ecosystems that house them?

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea states that the deep-sea minerals found within a nation’s marine boundaries — 200 miles beyond their physical borders — belong to that nation. That border can expand up to 350 nautical miles, Weaver said, if the nation applies for and is granted an extension, but beyond that, waters fall under ISA jurisdiction, with any discoveries therein deemed the “common heritage of mankind.”

Like it or not, that phrase, the common heritage of mankind, seems to put the onus on all of us to understand how we’ll affect these deep-sea ecosystems. Many scientists working in this realm think so. “These environments are just so complex,” Baker said. “It is very important that careful monitoring of any mining activity that does go ahead is extremely well thought through and standardized.”

“[The deep ocean] is often forgotten or understood as something that isn’t valuable from an ecological standpoint,” added Neumann. “But it is.”

MIDAS is in the midst of a three-year, $16 million project to determine whether these ecosystems will mind our presence. Most recently, a team explored a region of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the Azores to study plumes from mining and species that live near hydrothermal vents, Nature reported. “We don’t know how far the plumes will travel and how much toxic material it will contain,” Weaver said. “It will suffocate bottom-living organisms in the vicinity of the mining. We don’t know how far it’ll spread.”

Scientists also don’t know just how toxic the material will be, whether it matters where excess water gets dumped, how species in extremely stable environments might handle disturbances. The list goes on. The idea isn’t to halt deep-sea mining, but rather to establish a baseline for what these ecosystems currently look like and a set of best practices, Baker said. “The depth of studies required to fully understand these systems and to gauge the potential impact on the environment would require significant funding and time for survey and analysis.”

There’s still time, but we need to act now, she added. “We are certainly running out of time." As the mining industry moves forward, the environmental stewards can’t afford to stand still.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article listed Nautilus as Toronto-based.

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